Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/214

196 has one virtue has all virtues, and whether all sins are equal and equally to be punished—may appear to have a less direct bearing upon theology; but it will not escape observation that hardly one of them but has come to make part, if not of the formal creed, still of the accepted tradition of some one of the sects of Christendom. In the middle ages the association was the more closely felt because theology was almost universally the standard of knowledge, the test by which the goodness of a philosophical tenet was tried. We do not indeed presume to say that John of Salisbury calculated the issues to which he committed himself; certainly if any connexion of the sort just named could be proved he would have been the first to withdraw the problem in question out of the class of 'doubtfuls.' Still it is his signal virtue, a virtue which, if we mistake not, he derived immediately from Bernard of Chartres, that, although he held as strongly as any man to the principle just mentioned, he distinctly limited it to facts with regard to which authority was precise, and left the rest open questions.

He did more than this: he enlarged the conception of authority; for the divine influence, he maintained with Abailard, is not to be sought only in the written revelation but in its indwelling in man's reason.

The reasonable soul is the habitation of God, by participation in whom all things exist: the good man therefore, for virtue is the antecedent of the right exercise of reason, may be trusted to know. It is thus that John is able to declare that freedom is the most glorious of all things, because it is inseparable from, if not identical with, virtue.